CHAPTER 2
THE BREAKDOWN OF MEDIEVAL CIVILIZATION (1300 -
1500)

When a new historical epoch comes
to
birth, the travail is likely to be painful and prolonged. Our own
century appears to be such a time; our discomforts arise partly from
our position in an age that we know is dying while we are in the dark
about what will emerge. This should give us some understanding and
fellow feeling for the people of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
Europe, who also lived in an age of crisis and upheaval, as the old
yielded to the new. The distresses of the time resulted largely from
the desperate resistance of entrenched ideas and institutions to the
thrust of the different and unfamiliar. The changes that run through
these years were hastened by a purely accidental occurrence, the
Black Death that struck in the middle of the fourteenth century.
Plagues or epidemics were not uncommon; what distinguished the Black
Death was its severity. The disease was apparently the bubonic plague,
carried by rats. It may have come from outside Europe, on ships landing
in European harbors. It started in 1348 and swept through western
Europe. Some areas were little affected by it, but where it did strike
it carried off tremendous numbers of people. Statistics are not
available for this period, but there were places where as much as a
third of the population died. The incidence of the disease varied with
social position; the poor city workers, crowded together in unsanitary
conditions from which they could not hope to escape, suffered the
greatest number of casualties. The well-to-do, living in much more
healthful surroundings and able to get out of the crowded cities like
the company of young men and women who told each other stories in
Boccaccio's Decameron had a much better prospect of
survival.

After the initial impact of the plague, which had
exhausted itself by 1350, the disease remained endemic, recurring in
some places until the seventeenth century. Until its first appearance,
Europe had been experiencing a consistent growth in population. This
growth was now checked, and it was not until the sixteenth century that
population reached its former levels and continued. The plague was not
the only factor that depressed the growth of European population. From
about 1350, western Europe generally experienced depressed business
conditions, and this economic decline also lasted until the sixteenth
century. The economic slump was partly result, partly cause, of the
other disturbed conditions of the time.

The church passed
through a period of severe strain. One of its problems was the
prevalence of abuses, of which people were becoming increasingly
conscious. Those reached all the way to the top; hence the cry for a
reformation "in head and in members." Many of these abuses were
intimately connected with the wealth of the church. The fiscal system
of the church was highly developed, more so than those of contemporary
secular governments. Christendom was divided into collectorates, each
with a papal collector backed by formidable authority from the pope.
Numerous payments had to be made to Rome, mostly by the clergy, who
then got it back in one way or another from the laity. The latter had
their own payments to make to the church: tithes, fees to the church
courts, and in some countries a direct tax called Peter's Pence.
Priests were often criticized as greedy and extortionate. As economic
conditions worsened and the misery of the poor increased, social
protest reinforced complaints against the clergy. It was unbearable
that the sheep should be shorn for the benefit of their unworthy
shepherds. The wealth and luxurious living of bishops and other
prelates were a constant offense, and in the violent uprisings of the
period this was a familiar grievance.

Rich clergy were likely
to be worldly another source of discontent. Many earnest people felt
their spiritual needs were not being satisfied by the vast impersonal
mechanism of the church and by a priesthood that was to a large extent
either indifferent or incompetent. Many bishops and priests were
absentees, enjoying the fruits of their offices while leaving the
actual work to underpaid and uneducated substitutes. Some of the parish
clergy were ignorant of even the rudiments of their faith, and some
were illiterate. Many did not understand the Latin which they had to
use in the services.

Absenteeism from parishes went hand in
hand with pluralism; many members of the clergy held several positions
at the same time. The church suffered from the fact that powerful
laymen controlled a great many appointments, and awarded them on the
basis of nonreligious criteria. Kings normally had a great deal of
influence in filling church offices in their domains, and they tended
to make their selection on the basis of family connections, personal
friendship, or political considerations. A rich bishopric was
considered an appropriate reward for administrative or diplomatic
service.

One of the worst abuses was simony, the buying
and selling of church offices. (For the origin of this word, see the
Biblical story of Simon Magus, who tried to buy the gift of the Holy
Ghost, Acts 8.) As the financial needs of the papacy grew, simony
came to be increasingly resorted to as a revenue-raising device. In
fact, every office to which the popes had the right of appointment had
its own established price; with the passage of time the popes reserved
more and more appointments to themselves, thus increasing their sources
of income. They even sold expectatives, the right to hold an office at
some future date when the incumbent no longer occupied it. An
expectative might be purchased which entitled the buyer to hold an
office after it had been vacated by the person who held the first
expectative, and so on. Since these offices were purchased for money,
they were expected to produce a financial return for their holders.
Because of growing frustration and dissatisfaction with formal
religion, movements sprang up in the late Middle Ages to provide a
richer and more satisfying spiritual life. These movements, which
provide part of the background of the Protestant Reformation, are
discussed in connection with that movement.

While these
conditions were weakening the church from within, there were also
external forces which threatened it. Among these the most dangerous
were powerful monarchs in developing nations who were determined not to
submit to external authority and were supported by the patriotic
feeling of their people. The problems that popes, with their claims to
supranational authority, would be meeting from this source are well
illustrated by the famous quarrel between the French king Philip IV,
known as Philip the Fair, and Pope Boniface VIII, around the beginning
of the fourteenth century.

The question of the powers of the
church and of earthly authority and their relation to one another had
been fought out for hundreds of years in the realm of theoretical
writings and in concrete cases. Popes had claimed superiority over
secular rulers, sometimes using the figure of the two great lights
mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis. The "greater light" was the
church, and the "lesser light" the civil power or state. The conflict
of Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII was a practical one with
theoretical implications.

The practical issue which
precipitated the break was the desire of the king to tax the French
clergy. The church traditionally claimed that it could not be taxed
without its own consent, though it sometimes made "free gifts" to the
crown. In the course of the struggle, Boniface issued in 1302 the bull
Unam sanctam, which contained the most extreme assertion
of papal claims to superiority that had ever been issued. In this bull
the pope asserted in strong terms the primacy of the spiritual
authority over the temporal, and stated that every human soul depends
for its salvation on the pope.

This remarkable declaration of
papal authority did not correspond with the actual facts. So low had
sunk the reverence offered to the sacred person of the pontiff that in
the following year, 1303, Boniface was seized and briefly held prisoner
in the little town of Anagni by a combination of his French and Italian
enemies. Though soon released, he died a short time afterwards.

At this point, when the papacy needed all the strength it
could muster to face the power of the emerging European states, it
weakened itself through a succession of catastrophes which lasted for
over a century. First of all, from 1309 to 1378, the popes did not live
in Rome. In 1305 a French pope was elected, and in 1309 he moved to the
city of Avignon which, though not technically part of France, was
completely surrounded by French territory. When he died, a French pope
was chosen to succeed him, and French popes continued to be elected and
to live at Avignon for several decades. The College of Cardinals came
to be dominated by Frenchmen, and pope and cardinals incurred the
charge of being unduly influenced by the kings of France. Dante
pictures the papacy as the harlot of the French king, and Petrarch
inveighed against Avignon, where he lived in his youth.

Certainly Avignon was a more comfortable place to live in the
fourteenth century than Rome, torn by the strife of warring factions.
Nevertheless, the papal desertion of Rome roused bitter protest. It was
particularly unfortunate for the popes to identify themselves with one
of the states of Europe at a time of rising national feeling. This
identification was bound to be deeply offensive, especially in those
countries which were unfriendly to France. England was at war with
France much of the time; the Hundred Years' War started in 1337.
Englishmen were outraged that the popes were so closely associated with
their country's enemy. In Germany, the popes gave offense by their
intervention in the affairs of the Holy Roman Empire. Such intervention
was nothing new, but now it helped to bring about a virtual declaration
of German independence. In 1356, the Golden Bull, which made into law
the system of choosing the emperor by a college of seven electors, made
no reference to papal approval in the electoral process. By thus
ignoring the popes, who had always claimed that no man was emperor
without their approval, the German princes served notice that
henceforth they intended to conduct their political affairs without
papal sanction.

The period during which the papacy was
resident in Avignon is known as the "Babylonian Captivity." One of its
results was a loosening of the hold of the popes on their Italian
domain, the Papal States. Local tyrants were able to assume power in
many of the cities, and the French officials sent by the absentee pope
roused strong resentment. In the 1370s, revolt broke out in the Papal
States, abetted by Florence, which was at war with the pope from 1375
to 1378 (See Chapter 3, The Italian City-States of the Renaissance). It
was this threat to the pope's temporal power rather than any purely
religious motives that impelled the return of Gregory XI to Rome in
1377.

It is possible that Gregory XI was planning to abandon
the inconveniences of Rome and return to Avignon when death overtook
him in 1378. Since he died in Rome, the rules of the church required
that his successor be elected there. During the conclave the palace
where it was taking place was surrounded by a mob clamoring for a Roman
pope. The cardinals did not altogether give in to this demand, nor did
they choose one of their own number, but they did at least pick the
first Italian pope in over seventy years. He was the archbishop of
Bari, who assumed the papal name of Urban VI.

Urban proved
unsatisfactory to the cardinals; he was arbitrary, lacking in tact, and
believed in reform, which would have deprived the cardinals of some of
their income. Therefore, they met, alleged that Urban had been elected
under duress because of pressure from the mob, declared him deposed,
and chose another pope, who called himself Clement VII. Urban refused
to yield, and Clement eventually returned to Avignon.

The
period from 1378, the year of Clement's election, to 1417, when the
papacy was finally reunited, is known as the Great Schism. It
was one of the most serious scandals in church history, with two (later
three) claimants to the papacy. It was also a crisis of conscience for
Western Christians, faced with the dilemma of having to decide who was
truly the successor of Peter. The moral and spiritual authority and
prestige of the Holy See, already weakened, was further undermined.
Each of the European states had to make a choice as to which pope it
would recognize. For a while, the French monarchy took the unheard-of
step of refusing its allegiance to any pope.

Financial abuses
in the church were intensified as a result of the Great Schism. Each of
the rival popes possessed a much diminished allegiance, and
consequently a narrower revenue base. To maintain his income at
something like the normal level, he had consequently to make greater
demands. The general awareness of abuses, and the call for basic
reforms, became greater than ever. At the same time, the existing
structure of church government was subjected to close scrutiny, and
radical changes were suggested, with the leading role being taken by
scholars at the University of Paris. It was now proposed, in essence,
that for the pope's headship of the church there should be substituted
the authority of a general or ecumenical council. General councils had
met from time to time since the Council of Nicaea in 325, and their
pronouncements were regarded as authoritative for the church. However,
they had met sporadically, not at fixed intervals. By the time of the
Great Schism, they could be convened only by the pope.

Now it
was proposed to make the council a permanent body, meeting regularly
and serving as the highest governing body in the church. There were
various ideas as to how the council should be constituted. Some of the
more radical theorists proposed that laymen should be admitted to
membership, and the suggestion was even made to allow women to take
part. What it amounted to, in political terminology, was an attempt to
replace the papal government of the church with a more representative
polity. The papacy would not need to be abolished; the pope could
remain as the chief administrative officer of the church, carrying out
policies determined by the council. Underlying these ideas was a
conception of the church as consisting of the whole body of Christians,
instead of the common idea that the church meant the clergy.

Other reform ideas were increasingly voiced at the same time.
In protest against the great wealth of the church as a whole and of
some of the clergy, a return to apostolic poverty was called for. One
manifestation of this protest was the rise of a group in the Franciscan
order called the Spiritual Franciscans, who agreed to a return
to the practice of poverty as enunciated by the founder of their
order. The Spiritual Franciscans were officially condemned as
heretics by decretals of Pope John XXII in 1322-23. One of this group's
prominent members was the Englishman William of Ockham, an important
philosopher and a proponent of the conciliar theory of church
government.

Ockham himself was condemned specifically as a
heretic, as was his contemporary, the Italian Marsilio of Padua
(1275/80-1342), author of the famous book Defensor pacis
(The Defender of Peace). Marsilio argued for a more representative
government both in church and state, and claimed that the church, as a
spiritual body, had no right to any coercive power. Its job was to show
men how to attain salvation, not to administer earthly punishments. The
property of the church is held as the gift of the state and is,
therefore, revocable. Similarly with offices in the church: even the
pope, if unworthy, can be deposed by the secular arm. The ultimate
source of authority is the people. Marsilio's book, startlingly modern
in some of its ideas and proposals, is one of the most remarkable
productions of the Middle Ages.

The Great Schism, which helped
provide the occasion for all these radical ideas, could have ended at
the death of any of the competing pontiffs; all that was needed was for
his cardinals to acknowledge his rival. However, what actually occurred
was that on the decease of each of the rival popes, the cardinals chose
a successor, no doubt partly to protect their own vested interests.

Although the various popes often pledged themselves to work
for the reunification of the church, nothing came of this pledge.
Finally, a group of cardinals from both obediences determined to put an
end to a situation generally recognized to be intolerable. They called
a general council to meet at Pisa in 1409 and summoned the rival popes
to appear and have the validity of their claims adjudged. There was a
legal difficulty about the Council of Pisa from the outset, because it
was not summoned by the pope. The two popes ignored the summons, and
the council solemnly pronounced them contumacious and issued formal
sentences of deposition against them. It then proceeded to elect a new
pope, who took the name of Alexander V.

The problem of the
divided papacy remained unsolved. If anything, it grew worse, because
now there were three claimants to the papal throne. The Council of
Constance (1414-17) was able to end the schism because rulers and
peoples everywhere were willing to abandon their obedience to whichever
pope they supported in order to restore unity, and because of the
diligent efforts of the Holy Roman emperor Sigismund (1410-37) to this
end. With the emperor's backing, the council deposed one pope and
succeeded in getting one to abdicate his claims. The third, who never
gave up, was abandoned by all the states that had supported him, and
spent the rest of his life still claiming to be pope though virtually
nobody paid any attention.

In 1417 the council chose as pope a
member of the great Roman family of Colonna, who took the name of
Martin V. Before choosing him, the fathers at Constance were faced with
a crucial decision: Should they inaugurate the much needed reforms in
the church before electing a pope, or should they elect a pope first
and trust him to carry out the reforms "in head and members"? In the
end, it was the latter road that they decided to follow, and with
fateful results. As pope, Martin evinced little enthusiasm for reform,
and lost what was perhaps the last best chance to reform the church
from within before the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation.

The Council of Constance signifies the high-water mark in the
conciliar movement. Its decreeFrequens was
called by J. N. Figgis, a famous student of the history of political
theory, "The most important constitutional document of the fifteenth
century." It provided for regular meetings of the general council of
the church, the next session to be held in five years, the following
one in seven, and others at ten-year intervals thereafter. The
decreeSacrosanctaofficially declared the general
council of the church to be superior to the pope.

There was
another area in which the council was active: that of heresy. It
condemned the teachings of John Wycliffe and burned at the stake John
Hus and his follower Jerome of Prague. More will be said about these
matters shortly. In accordance with the decree Frequens, other
councils met during the next few years at the specified intervals, the
most important of them being the Council of Basel, which opened in
1431. From the first it was involved in a power struggle with Pope
Eugenius IV, who, like other popes, was not prepared to abdicate
supreme headship of the church. Although the council lasted for many
years in one form or another it went on until 1449 and even chose an
antipope in its struggle against Eugenius, in the long run it was the
papacy that won out. By the middle of the fifteenth century the
conciliar movement, as a means of changing the governmental system of
the church, was dead. Thus the monarchical principal was retained,
though the doctrine of conciliar supremacy was a most convenient weapon
in the hands of such monarchs as the kings of France in their recurrent
battles with the papacy. If we seek the causes of the failure of the
councils, one factor that stands out is the rising spirit of
nationalism in Europe. Success of the conciliar movement depended on
the ability of representatives from many different nations to work
together in regulating the affairs of the international church. This
was no longer possible, because national feeling had begun to throw up
walls of distrust and rivalry between the different countries. Two of
the most important, France and England, were at war throughout the
entire conciliar period, for the Hundred Years' War did not end until
1453.

Each of the states preferred to seek separately the best
bargain it could make with the church, and for this purpose, had to
determine whether it could get a better one from the pope or the
council. Normally it was the pope who was chosen, and this, in time,
strengthened papal authority and weakened that of the council. One such
arrangement was the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, an agreement between
the pope and the French king reached in 1438 during the period of the
Council of Basel. In return for recognition of the supremacy of the
pope over the council, the French church was released from the payment
of certain dues to the pope, and gained a great deal of authority in
the selection of its own officers, particularly the bishops.

The pope also gained strength when he persuaded
representatives of the Greek church to meet with him instead of with
the Council of Basel. The advance of the Ottoman Turks into eastern
Europe, where they conquered the Balkan peninsula and threatened
Constantinople itself, frightened the Byzantine emperor into seeking
defensive help from the West. No such help would be forthcoming unless
a religious agreement could be reached between the Eastern and Western
churches, severed for centuries. Representatives of the Eastern Empire
and church were ready to travel to the West to seek such an agreement,
and received rival invitations to meet with pope and council. The
pope's invitation was accepted, and in 1438 a council opened at Ferrara
to work out a settlement between the two churches. An outbreak of
plague in Ferrara caused the meetings to be moved to Florence in 1439.
Because of their desperate military situation, it was the Greeks who
had to give in and agree to a reunion on what amounted to western
terms. This agreement was regarded as a shameful submission to error
when it became known in the empire, and was, therefore, repudiated.
Constantinople was left to defend itself, and fell to the Turks in
1453. The problem of heresy, which concerned both the Councils of
Constance and of Basel, had become by the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries more serious than ever before. One reason for this is, again,
the rising tide of national sentiment.

When heretics
represented national resentment against the pope as a foreign power,
the papacy was likely to be nearly helpless to do anything to check
them. This was especially true of the two greatest heretics of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, John Wycliffe in England and John
Hus in Bohemia. Wycliffe (c.1330-84) was associated with Oxford
University as student, teacher, and preacher. In England, as elsewhere
in the fourteenth century, national resentment against Rome was strong.
This is clearly shown by the Statutes of Provisors and of
Praemunire, enacted several times in the fourteenth
century. The Statute of Provisors (1351) had the effect of
denying the pope the right to make appointments within the English
church. The Statute of Praemunire (1353) forbade the reception
of papal documents in England without express royal permission, and cut
off appeals from English ecclesiastical courts to the pope. Neither act
was consistently enforced, but both were used by kings of England as
bargaining devices in their encounters with the papacy. Nevertheless,
they serve as an accurate expression of antipapal sentiment in
fourteenth-century England.

These laws followed a
well-established tradition; struggles between kings and popes and
antipapal measures by king and Parliament had a long history in
England. In 1365, all antipapal legislation was reenacted by
Parliament. It must be remembered that at this time the English were
involved in a war with the French and the popes were Frenchmen living
in Avignon. In retaliation against this antipapal legislation, the pope
demanded that England pay him the arrears in tribute that it owed him.
Since the reign of John (1199 1216), the realm of England had
recognized the pope as feudal overlord and was obligated to pay him a
yearly tribute of one thousand marks (a mark was two-thirds of a
pound). The government had long ceased to make these payments, debts
which the pope now tried to collect.

In this situation the
government called on John Wycliffe to defend its refusal to pay
the money. He was the appointed spokesman for the national resistance
to the temporal power of Rome. His rejection of the papal claims to
tribute from a secular state was in accordance with his idea of
stewardship, which denied the concept of private property. The earth is
the Lord's; those to whom is allotted the use of any part of it are
stewards, who must justify their possession by the good use they make
of it. On this basis the church can be deprived of any of its temporal
possessions of which it is making improper use.

Wycliffe did
not believe that the church should own any property or have any
temporal power. Like Marsilio of Padua, he conceived of the church as a
purely spiritual body with no other function than that of imparting a
knowledge of salvation. It could not inflict punishments, including
excommunication. As time went on, and perhaps influenced by the Great
Schism which began in 1378, his views became more radical that is, they
began to involve theological doctrines. To deny the right of the church
to hold property or to wield secular power however distasteful such
views were to the pope was not considered as subversive as the
questioning of an established article of the faith. Thus, when Wycliffe
began to deny the doctrine of transubstantiation, many persons were
horrified who before had supported him. In denying transubstantiation,
he was attempting to undermine the special sanctity the church
attributed to the priest; he was saying that the bread and the wine in
the Eucharist, even after the priestly consecration, remained bread and
wine, and did not become the body and blood of Christ.

He also
held that popes could be deposed, and that there was no necessity for
the offices of pope or cardinals. Attempts by the pope to have him
tried and condemned failed because of the support he enjoyed in the
highest levels of government. This support may have been to some extent
withdrawn after his theological views became radical, but he was never
molested.

Wycliffe believed that the Scriptures should be made
available in the vernacular language. An English version of the entire
Bible appeared during his lifetime and seems to have been very widely
distributed and read. It is not clear how much Wycliffe had to do with
this Bible. It was long believed that he was the translator, but today
it is held that he took little if any direct part in the translation
and that his share was probably confined to stimulating others to do
the actual work. The work of spreading the English Bible was undertaken
by the so-called poor priests who traveled throughout the country; it
is no longer considered certain that Wycliffe had very much to do with
sending them out. His followers became numerous, at Oxford and
elsewhere throughout the country. They were called "Lollards,"
an old word meaning "mumblers," which had been used for previous
English heretics. The political situation in England soon brought about
their suppression. In 1399 King Richard II was deposed and replaced by
the Lancastrian Henry IV. Among the forces that had worked for the
accession of the Lancastrians was the church. As a repayment for this
support and a guarantee of further assistance, the new line of monarchs
had to agree to the demands of the church for the prosecution of
heresy. One of the results of this collaboration was the law De
haeretico comburendo (On the burning of heretics) of 1401. Under
this law, very few heretics were actually burned. After an abortive
uprising in 1417, led by Sir John Oldcastle, Lollardy went underground.
Currents of Wycliffite sentiment remained active, particularly among
humble artisans, surfacing occasionally through court records when
suspected heretics were brought to trial.

Meanwhile, the ideas
of Wycliffe had gotten to Bohemia. There were good opportunities for
the transmission of ideas between the two countries. Richard II's queen
was a Bohemian princess, and many students passed between the English
universities, Oxford and Cambridge, and the University of Prague,
founded by Emperor Charles IV in 1348. Although the ideas of Wycliffe
helped to mold the Bohemian, or Czech, heretical movement, it is likely
that the movement would have occurred anyway.

The movement in
Bohemia was a revolt against the Roman church and an expression of
Czech nationalism, directed particularly against the influence of
Germans. All this is made clear in the career of its leader John
Hus (1369-1415). As a preacher in the Bethlehem Chapel in
Prague,
he gave sermons in the vernacular, in which he called for reforms in
the church, including the lives of the higher clergy. As a professor in
the University of Prague, Hus was prominent in a conflict between the
Bohemian members of the university and the Germans who had dominated
it. The outcome of the struggle was a Czech victory; henceforth, the
Bohemian party was supreme in the university. A great exodus of Germans
took place, one result of which was the foundation of the University of
Leipzig.

Hus did not deny transubstantiation, but he was
accused of doing so. He and his followers did, however, ask that both
bread and wine be given to the laity in communion, instead of just the
bread as was customary. Those who made this demand were known as
Calixtines (from the Latin word for chalice or cup) or
Utraquists (from the Latin word for both, meaning both bread and
wine). Hus's following among his fellow countrymen became so great that
the archbishop of Prague asked him to leave the city for the sake of
preserving public order. Hus complied with this request, going into the
countryside where he continued to preach and work. From there he was
summoned to the Council of Constance, with the promise of a
safe-conduct from the Emperor Sigismund, which should have ensured good
treatment at the council and enabled him to return home in safety.

When Hus appeared at the council, the emperor's promise was
disregarded, and he was thrown into prison under conditions so bad that
his health was undermined. Although Sigismund made some attempt at
protest, he did not insist, fearing to antagonize the council, which he
felt he needed. Hus, therefore, remained a prisoner until eventually he
was put on trial before the council, convicted of heresy, and condemned
to death. He was burned at the stake on July 6, 1415. To justify this
act in the face of the emperor's promise of a safe-conduct (although
the safe-conduct was never issued), the council issued an official
statement that is it not necessary to keep faith with heretics.

The death of John Hus did not end the movement that he had
led, but intensified it. Revolt broke out in Bohemia when the fate of
the great leader became known, a revolt against both the Roman church
and the emperor Sigismund, who was also king of Bohemia. The troops
sent by the church and the emperor to crush the revolt were repelled,
Sigismund ceased to rule in Bohemia, and the rebels even went on the
offensive and invaded Germany. Since it proved impossible to subdue the
Bohemians, it finally became necessary to treat them somewhat more
respectfully. They were invited to send representatives to the Council
of Basel to discuss the theological points at issue.

The
result was a compromise that gave the Bohemian church a special status.
The most significant concession was the granting of the cup to the
laity in the communion service. It is likely the Bohemian
revolutionaries would have received even more concessions from Rome had
they not split among themselves into an extreme party and a more
moderate one. Peace was restored, and the government of Sigismund was
once more established.

Thus the church came through the
fifteenth century with its traditional government, doctrine, and abuses
more or less intact. That it had been weakened in the process seems
evident from its inability to cope successfully with the greater crises
of the sixteenth century.

THE HUNDRED YEARS'
WAR

The late Middle
Ages was an age of turmoil and conflict in secular and ecclesiastical
affairs. International and civil wars characterized the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, and the most serious was the Hundred Years'
War. England and France were the chief antagonists in this
struggle, which lasted from 1337 to 1453. The precipitating occasion
for the war was the refusal of Edward III, king of England, to swear
homage to Philip VI, king of France, for England's Continental
possessions. The underlying cause was the existence of these English
possessions on French territory. The war exemplified the incipient
growth of nation-states and the accompanying spirit of nationalism or
patriotism. It was also a stimulus to the further development of these
nations and of the national spirit.

The war was fought on
French soil, and for much of the time the advantage lay with the
English invaders. The battles of Crcy (1346) and Poitiers (1356) were
great English victories, won against superior numbers by an army that
was more cohesive, better-trained, and equipped with more modern
weapons than the rather undisciplined body of feudal knights that
fought for France. At Poitiers the French king, John the Good
(1350-64), was captured, and spent most of the rest of his life in
England. France was further weakened by the reign of Charles VI (1380
1422), who was subject to intermittent bouts of insanity. Most of all,
France suffered from internal conflict, combined with the rise of the
powerful duchy of Burgundy. When John the Good named his son Philip
duke of Burgundy, he unwittingly gave rise to a grave threat to French
power. Philip, known as Philip the Bold, and his three successors
followed a policy of expansion by means of marriage, purchase, and
conquest that created a powerful state situated between France and
Germany, the most important component of which was the Netherlands.

Burgundy under its four great dukes became a center of
wealth and culture. The Order of the Golden Fleece, founded in 1430 by
Philip the Good (1419 67), was one of the most distinguished of all
knightly orders. Cities noted for their trade and industry made the
area one of the richest in Europe. Among these cities the most
important included Bruges, Ghent, and Lige, with Brussels and Antwerp
developing a little later. A great school of artists flourished, which
will be more fully dealt with in Chapter 22. The dukes had a sincere
interest in art and literature, encouraging and supporting them.

The successful policy of territorial aggrandizement, combined
with economic prosperity, made Burgundy a factor to be reckoned with in
European affairs. During much of the Hundred Years' War, the
Burgundians were allied with the English against France, an alliance
which, if continued, might have crushed the French ability to resist.
The seriousness of the situation was not lost on the French government,
which strove for a reconciliation with Burgundy and finally achieved it
in 1415.

It was the desire of the dukes of Burgundy to free
themselves from their feudal relationship of vassalage to the king of
France and to set up a fully independent state. This dream came to an
end with the premature death in battle of Charles the Bold (or more
accurately the Rash) in 1477. He left as heir only a daughter, Mary,
who became the wife of Maximilian of Hapsburg, later to be Holy Roman
Emperor Maximilian I. In this way the bulk of the Burgundian
domain became part of the Hapsburg inheritance, while part of it,
including the original duchy of Burgundy, fell to the French. The
reconciliation of France with Burgundy in 1415 did not mark an
immediate recovery by France in the war against England. In the same
year, the young king of England Henry V invaded France and won the
battle of Agincourt. English successes over the next few years
culminated in the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, which secured to England a
large block of French territory. The treaty was sealed by the marriage
of Henry and the French princess Catherine. Their son was to be
recognized as king of both France and England. This treaty, if carried
out, would have disinherited the dauphin Charles, son of Charles VI.
Both Henry V and Charles VI died in 1422. The infant Henry VI, son of
Henry V and Catherine, was recognized by one party as king of both
England and France, while the hapless dauphin held only a part of
southern France and was rather contemptuously referred to as the "king
of Bourges." It was this dauphin, however, who was eventually to win
out, less perhaps by his own talents than because of the help of
others, which has given him the epithet of "Charles the Well-Served."
The most remarkable of his helpers was Jeanne d'Arc, or Joan of Arc
(1412 31).

Jeanne was a peasant girl from Domrmy in Lorraine
who, though far from the scenes of battle, was deeply concerned about
the fate of France. She became convinced that saints appeared to her
while she was in the fields and announced to her that her destiny was
to go to the aid of her country and, in particular, the dauphin
Charles. She managed to make her way to Charles's court, where she
succeeded in being given command of a body of French soldiers. With
these troops she played an important part in lifting the siege of
Orlans, a great victory for the French and an important factor in
reviving their morale. After this, Jeanne's career was marked by
continuing success for a while, until she had accomplished her great
purpose, the coronation of Charles as Charles VII in the traditional
ceremony at Reims. In 1431 she was captured by the Burgundians, who
turned her over to the English. She was put on trial before an
ecclesiastical court at Rouen, charged with heresy, witchcraft, and
other offenses. Though the trial was ostensibly on religious grounds,
it was in reality political. Her judges knew that she would have to be
condemned; in the psychological atmosphere of the time, an acquittal
would have convinced many that she did in reality have a divine mission
and that God favored the French. The records of her questioning show
that she was remarkably clever in meeting the arguments of her
accusers, men of great learning and experience, in spite of her youth
and lack of education. Nevertheless, the outcome of the trial was a
foregone conclusion. Condemned to die at the stake as a heretic, for a
time she lost faith in her mission and recanted. But she soon recovered
her nerve and reasserted her conviction that the saints had indeed sent
her. She was, therefore, condemned again, this time as a relapsed
heretic, and burned at the stake on May 30, 1431. In 1456 a new trial
was held in which her name was formally cleared of the charges for
which she had been condemned. In 1920 she was canonized.

The
figure of St. Joan has proved to be a source of endless fascination and
wonder. She appears not only in historical works but in drama and in
opera as well. One reason for the perennial interest in her
career is the mystery that surrounds it. How are we to explain her
extraordinary successes and accomplishments? Was she really a saint,
divinely inspired? Or was she a clever impostor? One proposition that
can probably be accepted by most students is that she owed much of her
strength to the national spirit that she represented, and to which she
gave an abiding stimulus. Ever since her own time she has stood as an
embodiment of the love of France. Although it still took many years to
make France free of the English, the tide had begun to turn. The death
of Henry V in 1422 left an infant on the English throne, a state of
affairs that was invariably a source of weakness to any country.
Already there had been signs of restlessness among the nobility and a
desire to gain power at the expense of the crown, but Henry V had for a
time successfully channeled these energies into foreign invasion. His
death removed the strongest obstacle to the ambitions of the nobles,
and for several decades England was torn by civil war, as factions
among the great families fought for the crown and the control of the
state.

This period of civil strife in England is known as the
Wars of the Roses. The contending factions were the houses of
Lancaster, symbolized by the red rose, and of York, represented by the
white rose. As Henry VI grew to manhood, it became apparent that he had
inherited from his maternal grandfather, Charles VI of France, a
tendency toward insanity, along with a mild and devout character. Under
these conditions, it is not surprising that he proved unable to
maintain order. Eventually the Yorkists gained the throne in the person
of Edward IV (1461-70; 1471-83) and his brother Richard III (1483-85).
At the battle of Bosworth in 1485, Richard was killed, and the crown
passed to Henry Tudor, who as Henry VII opened a new era in English
history.

All these events in England aided the French in the
fight to drive the invaders from their homeland. By 1453, when the
French recovered Bordeaux, the Hundred Years' War was essentially over,
though the two countries continued to make hostile gestures and Edward
IV staged a brief invasion in 1475, in alliance with his
brother-in-law, Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Of all her possessions in
France, which had at one time been so extensive, England retained only
the port city of Calais with its surrounding country. Paradoxical as it
may seem, both France and England came out of the war strengthened in
some ways, even though England had lost much territory and France, as
the scene of the fighting, had suffered great devastation. The English
had now to be satisfied with their island, but this meant a contiguous
territory and a population far more homogeneous than would have been
the case if it had included parts of France. It is highly likely that
the English would eventually have lost their Continental possessions in
any event. In time, the English would hold that their true field of
growth lay outside Europe, and the loss of their Continental foothold
may have hastened the day when this could become clear. As for France,
she had not only gained a larger body of territory but also had
strengthened her governmental institutions. During the war, the crown
had acquired the right to levy direct taxes and to use these for the
purpose of maintaining troops. These prerogatives were not lost at the
end of the war, and so the French monarchy entered the sixteenth
century equipped with two of the most important qualifications of the
modern state: the powers to levy taxes and to maintain an army.

Both countries emerged from their long struggle with a
heightened self- consciousness and a stronger sense of national and
patriotic pride, brought about by the presence of a dangerous and
easily identified enemy. War is one of the sources of nationalism.

SOCIAL UPHEAVAL AND REVOLUTIONARY
MOVEMENTS

Another
indication that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were witnessing
the breakdown of an existing society and the birth of a new one is the
prevalence of social protest and class struggle, often assuming the
character of revolutionary movements. In England the question was
asked, "When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?" A
spirit of Christian egalitarianism began to spread, challenging the
great discrepancies between rich and poor on the grounds of men's
common status as children of one God. The wealth of the clergy was a
particularly sore grievance.

After the Black Death the size of
the laboring population was seriously diminished, and wages went up.
The government attempted to hold down wages, and this generated
discontent. Radical leaders like John Ball, Jack Straw, and Wat Tyler
influenced the masses.

The climax was the Peasants' Revolt
of 1381, which involved a broader section of English society than
the name implies, since many of the London poor became part of it. The
rebels gathered in many of the counties and marched on London, where
their movement was joined by numerous apprentices, workers, and
unemployed. Before they were pacified, they had sacked several noble
houses and Lambeth Palace, the London home of the archbishop of
Canterbury, and murdered the archbishop. To quiet them, King Richard II
met them at Blackheath. Since they consistently claimed to be
protesting, not against the king but against his evil advisers, they
allowed themselves to be satisfied with royal promises and they
disbanded. After this, little if anything was done to meet their
grievances, and the causes of their discontent remained. In some cases,
their unhappiness may have made them Lollards, although it does not
appear that Lollardy was one of the chief causes of the revolt.

In France the Hundred Years' War brought great suffering to
the countryside, and waves of peasant discontent swept the country,
particularly in the year 1358. This peasant unrest was called the
Jacquerie from the nickname applied to the French peasant,
Jacques Bonhomme. Another significant social development in France
during the war was the rising importance of the city of Paris. In the
years 1356-58, one of the leading figures in French political life was
Étienne Marcel, who held the important office of provost of the
merchants in Paris and for a while was master of the city, until he was
assassinated in 1358. Under his leadership the interests and needs of
the bourgeoisie, or town dwellers, made themselves heard at the highest
levels of government.

Something analogous took place also in
the flourishing commercial and industrial cities of the Low Countries.
Here there was antagonism between the workers and merchants of the
cities, on the one hand, and the noble class on the other. There were
underlying economic reasons for this hostility, as can be most clearly
seen in the case of Flanders. The textile manufacturers and workers in
the great Flemish cities were aware of their dependence on English
wool, and inclined, therefore, to side with England, whereas the counts
of Flanders tended to identify themselves with the interests of their
overlords, the kings of France.

In 1302 there had occurred the
Matins of Bruges, a bloody uprising of the workers of that city
against the French and the count of Flanders. During the Hundred Years'
War, these antagonisms were heightened. Under the leadership of Jacob
van Artevelde and his son, Philip, the workers of Ghent offered serious
resistance to the pro-French policy of the counts. The rise of the
Arteveldes signifies something more than a split over foreign policy;
like the career of tienne Marcel, it points to the emergence of a new
factor in European society, the growing cities with their outlook
deeply affected by the needs of business, industry, trade, and banking.

THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE LATE MIDDLE
AGES

To summarize the
events described in this chapter, it is clear that in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries western Europe was in the throes of a more or
less continuing crisis. Tension and conflict within church and society,
as well as between states, brought about constant unrest and disorder.
The strong attachment of contemporary observers to the ideals of order
and stability caused them to look on their times with gloomy
foreboding.

The emotional atmosphere of the late Middle Ages
has been brilliantly defined in the book, The Waning of the Middle
Ages, by the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. In this book he
is particularly concerned with Flanders and France. It was a time, he
says, when "a sombre melancholy weighs on people's souls."1 There was an intense preoccupation
with death. Depictions of the Dance of Death were common in woodcuts,
drawings, and paintings. Over and over the theme was repeated that
Death comes to all: Popes, kings, emperors are subject to it along with
the humblest peasant.

Obsessed with the shortness of human
life, the men of this age were also acutely aware of the transitory
character of human beauty. "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" asked
Franois Villon, reviewing the beautiful women of legend and history. In
another one of his poems he has an old prostitute comparing her present
repulsiveness with the charms of her youth.

There was
a factual basis for the concern with death. Life expectancy was
shorter, and infant mortality was high. Unsanitary living conditions,
plague, poor or insufficient food, to say nothing of war and crime, all
made the risks of life and the chances of death greater than they are
now.

Religion was powerful in this age, but in a society
breaking away from familiar moorings and obsessed with death it took
some extreme forms. An apocalyptic mood was common: Men had visions and
dreamed dreams. Many thought that they were living in the last days of
the world. A common theme of art in this period was the Passion, the
most tragic of religious subjects; the suffering Jesus was emphasized
rather than the glorified Christ. Religious devotion sometimes assumed
abnormal forms, among them hysterical repentance and extreme ascetic
practices, such as flagellation. But these acts of almost excessive
piety might alternate, in the same persons, with orgies of sensual
indulgence.

The ideals of knighthood, of chivalry, continued
to receive lip service, but they were becoming increasingly
anachronistic in the age of rising towns. The historian Froissart,
writing about the events in France and Flanders during the Hundred
Years' War, concentrates on the deeds of nobles and princes, regarding
the movements among the city populations as a rather irritating
distraction from the main events. There were no doubt many of
his contemporaries who, like Froissart, failed to grasp the fact that
what to them seemed of paramount interest belonged to a dying society,
while the future was being shaped largely by forces that they either
ignored or affected to disdain.